Just started a research project? Struggling to make a research project work? This seminar provides tips and strategies to successfully create interdisciplinary research teams, plan your project from start to finish, stick to your timeline, and get (multiple!) manuscripts submitted. The presentation includes examples from a study of mental health services research, and is applicable to qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods studies in public health. Presented by Jennifer Wisdom, PhD MPH, Professor of of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Center for Innovation in Mental Health at CUNY GSPHHP.

Dr. Stefan Peterson is currently Chief of Health Section for UNICEF globally, based in New York. He's a Professor of Global Health at Uppsala University and, prior to that, at the Global Health Division of Karolinska Institute. He has also been visiting professor at Makerere University in Uganda. As a health systems researcher and medical doctor, he has done extensive field work in Tanzania and Uganda, and has worked with different ministries of health, organizations such as WHO, and implemented projects supported by Sida, the Gates Foundation, and the European Union. He was also a co-founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres Sweden and the CCM Task Force Operations Research Group. Details and RSVP.

Dr. Kayla de la Haye will be discussing how the complex web of family, friend, and peer relationships in which we are embedded--i.e., our social networks--influence eating, physical activity, and obesity, and how the dynamics of our evolving behaviors and social networks shape population obesity rates. The talk will outline intervention and policy strategies that have the potential to activate, harness, or alter social networks and broader social-ecological systems, so that these social contexts play a more supportive role in the prevention and treatment of obesity.
She has examined the spread of obesity in social networks, and produced innovative findings that peer network effects on obesity-related behaviors are important mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon. And she collaborates on several projects that explore how social-ecological systems influence health behaviors (diet, physical activity, substance use) in youth and families, and is working to develop interventions that activate and harness social networks to increase healthy behaviors and reduce disease risk among at-risk populations.

Dr. Kayla de la Haye is an Assistant Professor of Preventive Medicine at the University of Southern California, and specializes in applying social network analysis and systems science to health promotion and disease prevention. She is also is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Network of Social Network Analysis (INSNA), and is a consulting editor for Connections (the official journal of INSNA). She holds a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Adelaide in Australia.

The imbalance between the burden of mental disorders and the investments made to addressing it is indicated by the 10/90 gap: where 10% of global spending on research is directed towards the problems that affect the poorest 90% of the world's population (Saxena et al., 2006). This research gap disproportionately affects low-and middle-income countries more than high-income countries because prevention and treatment for mental disorders rely on cultural norms. The dearth of research is problematic for the design of policies and organization of practice globally. Addressing this gap, this talk starts with an overview of research methodologies in vogue within the global mental health epistemic community. I draw on my own publications, as well as those of my colleagues. I conclude by discussing promising avenues of research. Presented by Gordon Shen, PhD, Assistant Professor of Health Policy and Management at CUNY GSPHHP.

Dr. Alexis Descatha's major field of work is in occupational health. He leads the occupational health unit at Poincaré Teaching hospital (Paris Hospital, Garches site, AP-HP) and is a Professor at the Versailles and St Quentin University (UVSQ). Dr. Descatha's primary areas of interest involve the epidemiology of musculoskeletal disorders. He also conducts research on emergencies in occupational settings and works in a pre-hospital intensive care unit (SAMU92). He is chairman of the scientific committee of Emergency Preparedness and Response for ICOH (the International Commission on Occupational Health).

Understanding Networks: The Rising Importance of Qualitative Research in the Big Data Era

Mario L. Small, Ph.D., is Grafstein Family Professor at Harvard University. Author of numerous award-winning books and articles on urban poverty, support networks, qualitative and mixed methods, and a host of other topics, Small is currently working to transform how social scientists use newly available forms of data to understand urban poverty and writing a book on how actors mobilize their networks when seeking social support.

Did you miss the fall 2016 seminar on writing grant proposals? Join the Center for Innovation in Mental Health and learn how to plan for external funding, prepare your grant proposal, and submit it. Understand the skills and support you need to find appropriate funding mechanisms, interpret funding announcements and complete proposal requirements, successfully package the proposal, and work with your SPH proposal team. Presented by Jennifer Wisdom, PhD MPH, Professor of of Health Policy and Management and Director of the Center for Innovation in Mental Health at CUNY GSPHHP.

Dr. Collins Airhihenbuwa is a global expert on health behavior and a pioneer in centralizing culture in health behaviors. He has led research collaborations, institutional partnerships, and mentoring of faculty and professional staff at various institutions globally. He is the author of PEN-3 model used to locate health behaviors in cultures. He is a consultant to several UN agencies, including WHO, UNFPA, and UNAIDS. He has authored over 130 articles, book chapters, and books. Books include Health and Culture: Beyond the Western Paradigm (1995); Healing Our Differences: the Crisis of Global Health and the Politics of Identity (2007); He was the lead author of the UNAIDS Communications Framework for HIV/AIDS: A New Direction, 2000, sponsored by UNAIDS and involved 100+ researchers and practitioners from 5 continents with final report translated into French, Spanish and KiSwahili. He is co-author of Public Health Critical Race Praxis. He is a former President and Distinguished Fellow of the Society for Public Health Education and a fellow of the American Academy of Health Behavior and the Academy of Behavioral Medicine Research. Previously, he served as head of the department of Biobehavioral health at Penn State and more recently as Dean of the College for public health and social justice at Saint Louis University. Dr. Airhihenbuwa received a BS from Tennessee State University and an MPH and PhD from the University of Tennessee.

AT&T Executive Education and Conference CenterThe University of Texas at Austin

Improving Population Health: Now, Across People's Lives and Across Generations to Come

The 3rd annual interdisciplinary population health research conference will bring scholars and practitioners from different disciplinary backgrounds together to share and discuss the science, practice and policy of population health. This meeting is also the first membership meeting of The Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science (IAPHS).

The conference is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and is organized by the Interdisciplinary Association for Population Health Science, the Population Research Institute at Penn State University,The Population Research Center at the University of Texas, the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University and the Institute for Policy and Social Research at the University of Kansas.

The submission deadline is April 7, 2017.

Who should submit? Population health scientists from any academic discipline, career stage, and sector committed to improving population health in the U.S.

The meeting is free and open to the public. Registration is required and will be open in late May!

Please click here to read our Call for Submissions and How to Submit an Abstract for the Conference.

Kelli O'Laughlin, MD, MPH, attended the Oregon Health & Science University School of Medicine (2003) and completed her emergency medicine residency at the University of California, Los Angeles / Olive-View UCLA Emergency Medicine Residency Program (2007). She earned her MPH at the Harvard School of Public Health (2008). She is an emergency medicine physician at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts and an Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. She is a Research Fellow at the Massachusetts General Hospital Medical Practice Evaluation Center. Dr. O'Laughlin is faculty at the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and the Partners Center of Expertise in Global and Humanitarian Health.

Shotgun Metagenomics studies the microbial diversity of specific environments, including the human body. It allows obtaining snapshots of the taxonomic composition and functional potential of a microbial community (microbiome). These microbiome characteristics are niche-specific and are shaped by biochemical factors, such as oxygen and nutrients availability, pH, and temperature. The thousands of bacteria, archaea, viruses, and micro eukaryotes in a microbiome are cross-interacting through ecological relations of mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism. However, despite their relevance, the network of interactions between microbes in microbiomes are not yet well understood, and methods that can scale up to thousands of samples are not available. Here we propose a new method to build microbe-microbe interaction networks, and apply it to thousands of microbiomes from the curatedMetagenomicData resource, a collaboration between CUNY and the University of Trento providing the largest collection of consistently processed shotgun metagenomics datasets available. We considered as features the relative abundances of each species in >4400 human gut microbiome samples from healthy individuals. Preliminary experiments show that our method can easily scale to the number of samples present in the curatedMetagenomicData. Other methods we tested, i.e. CCREPE and SPIEC-EASI, fail to scale to the same number of input samples. The results we obtained provided preliminary insights about the interactions between microbes in the healthy human gut microbiome. In particular, several Bacteroides genera belonging to the Bacteroidetes phylum showed a positive correlation among each other, suggesting that specific host and environment have a similar impact on these phylogenetically related organisms. Interestingly, we found nodes with a high number of connections to involve genera that are usually of low abundance and understudied, thus confirming that some interactions would need to be further explored. We foresee the possibility to use the reconstructed networks to characterize microbiome types.

About the Speaker

Francesco Asnicar is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Trento, Italy, supervised by Prof. Enrico Blanzieri at the Department of Information Engineering and Computer Science (DISI) and Prof. Nicola Segata at the Laboratory Computational Metagenomics at the Centre for Integrative Biology (CIBIO). Francesco's main work is studying the microbiome through shotgun metagenomics, by developing new computational analysis tools, with a particular interest on microbial ecology and phylogenomics analysis.

No Population Left Behind

The New York State Department of Health AIDS Institute (NYSDOH AI) is hosting the second annual Ending the Epidemic Summit on December 5-6, 2017 at the Empire State Plaza Convention Center and accompanying meeting rooms.

Sheri Weiser, MD, MPH, MA, is an Associate Professor of Medicine and internist at UC San Francisco's Division of HIV, Infectious Diseases and Global Medicine at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. Her research focuses on the impact of food insecurity and other social and structural factors on treatment outcomes for HIV and other chronic diseases. Dr. Weiser also evaluates food insecurity interventions as a way to improve health outcomes in domestic and international settings. She is currently leading several NIH-funded longitudinal studies to understand impacts of food insecurity on HIV treatment outcomes, cardiovascular risk, and aging outcomes among HIV-infected women. Dr. Weiser is also leading several domestic and international clinical trials evaluating food insecurity and livelihood interventions as a way to improve HIV treatment outcomes. She has published over 100 manuscripts on food insecurity and related topics, including HIV stigma, mental health, and women's empowerment, and has been the principal investigator on over 20 research grants in the area. Dr. Weiser actively mentors students, post-doctoral fellows and junior faculty, and currently has an active NIH K24 mentoring award where she is focusing on mentorship in the area of health disparities, HIV and aging. She completed her medical degree at Harvard Medical School and then completed residency training in internal medicine at UCSF. Dr. Weiser also earned an MA in Medical Anthropology from Harvard University and an MPH in Epidemiology from UC Berkeley.